Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 56
EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY against those who dared to plead the cause of morality albeit within the framework of Communism. . So in Marxism there is neither room for revelation from on high, nor for any code of ethics based on revelation. Marx must have deemed it essential to banish morality from human affairs because of its implied potential to lead to God. . Another potent reason why he may have rejected morality could be the fear that morality would stand in the way of uninhibited proletarian revolution. The proletariat were tied to their bourgeois masters, in the name of moral obligation. Such ties must be shattered and the masses must be set free to do whatever they could to rebel against their despotic usurpers. No moral obligation must be permitted to stand in the way. They should feel free to kill, murder, rob, burn and destroy to annihilate the bourgeois order of economic and political domination. Thus he perceived morality as an arch-enemy of his Godless system. . Despite this matter-of-fact level-headedness of Marx, he is still full of inconsistencies. He lays the foundation for his projected ideas so soundly and firmly on reason and analysis, that it is hard indeed to suspect him of the crime of inherent contradictions. Yet contradictions run deep in. Marxism. The total rejection of morality on the one hand, and the launching of a revolutionary movement founded entirely on the moral phenomenon of sympathy, on the other, is one such example of inconsistency. . But that is not all. The sympathy for the cause of the miserable, if carried beyond all boundaries of justice and fair play leading to cruelty to others, is where the contradiction becomes more glaring. If there is no justice in human affairs and you start a movement in the name of justice to rehabilitate it, you cannot violate the very 56